In a speech[1] prepared for the California Science Center in Los Angeles on January 31, 1998, Gore described a digital future where schoolchildren - indeed all the world's citizens - could interact with a computer-generated three-dimensional spinning virtual globe and access vast amounts of scientific and cultural information to help them understand the Earth and its human activities.
[2] Many aspects of his proposal have been realized - for instance, virtual globe geo-browsers such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Maps 3D for commercial, social and scientific applications.
The Digital Earth imagined in the speech has been defined as an "organizing vision" to steer scientists and technologists towards a shared goal, promising substantial advances in many scientific and engineering areas, similar to the Information superhighway.
[10] Between 1998 and 2001, the NASA-chaired Interagency Digital Earth Working Group (IDEW) contributed to this growth with a particular focus on interoperability issues,[11] giving rise to the Web Map Service standard among others.
However, the philosophical foundations for Digital Earth can be more closely aligned with the increased awareness of global changes and the need to better understand the concepts of sustainability for the planet's survival.
These roots can be traced back to visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller who proposed development of a GeoScope half a century ago, analogous to a microscope to examine and improve our understanding of the planet Earth.
[11] In 1999, NASA was selected to head a new Interagency Digital Earth Working Group (IDEW), due to its reputation for technology innovations and its focus on the study of planetary change.
While initially limited to government personnel, industry and academia were early observers attending IDEW workshops to discuss topics such as, visualization, information fusion, standards and interoperability, advanced computational algorithms, digital libraries and museums.
Within two years, these were captivating international audiences, including Kofi Annan and Colin Powell, in government, business, science, and mass media who began to purchase the early commercial geo-browsers.
Introduction of satellite data into commercially accessible spatial toolboxes significantly advanced the capacity to map, monitor, and manage our planet's resources and provide a unifying perspective on the Digital Earth vision.
Originating from China's satellite remote sensing community, Digital Earth prowess spread to a range of applications including flood predictions, dust cloud modeling, environmental assessments, and city planning.
UNEP provided further public demonstrations for this early Digital Earth system at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September, 2002 at Johannesburg, South Africa.
In seeking an engineering approach to system-wide development of the Digital Earth model, recommendations were made at the 3rd UNGIWG Meeting, June 2002, Washington, D.C. for creating a document on the Functional User Requirements for geo-browsers.
Citizens in the Gifu Prefecture upload information to community-scale Digital Earth programs with from their smartphones on topics ranging from first sightings of fireflies in spring to location of blocked handicap access ramps.